I play this lil game here often so if something doesn’t work right you can be sure I’ll find it @Carolyne 
Hi @Carolyne
Was going to stop fling with Quintus and got this error - Line 701 invalid string open quote with no close quote: "exitstrategy = dump and successful spurn.
@piggleywinks: Hi. Just tried to fix that, and saving to Dropbox ate the file entirely ( 
?! I don’t think it was Dropbox’s fault–I think something went wonky on my computer). Thank goodness for backups. It will be both fixed back online in a few minutes.
“What’s on the chain?” the ringleader demands. His breath puffs rankly across your skin. “Hand it over.” The point of his rusty knife pokes the underside of your chin. leading right through the Forum. We could see the Senate House and the Emperor’s palace from there, and I’d love a look at the new arena, even from the outside.
The ending of the paragraph I think got misplaced from somewhere else.
@Dark_Bear2899: Fixed! All sorts of artifacts are coming up from changing the variables. Thanks to everyone for their patience while I run all of these to ground.
Hi @Carolyne Here are a few more items for your review. Testing and patience is all part of the process. We are with you. : )
Exploring Scaurus’ office with my slave. We talked about my parents. then I chose the option re: it would be wrong before the gods to abandon my ancestors, it’s what we do during our lives, I don’t believe in those old rituals and I don’t believe our ancestors hear us.
All 4 get the error: Line 1389: non existent variable ‘sp_man’
same thing happens when I peruse his art collection: Line 1371: non existent variable ‘sp_man’
It’s just another typical day: you’ve asked Quintus’s thoughts on Aristotle’s discussion of what makes a good and ethical person, and he shrugs. “He makes pleasure and friendship complicated,” he says, “but…” He presses her (*his) lips closed and shrugs again with a bored toss of black curls.
When I Chose to Let my slave share my blankets for warmth and a “little more” usually The next page starts out with an incomplete sentence or thought. Here are some examples:
~ Scaurus’ house with Pavo girl/girl and boy/boy:
with bright and eager eyes
Quite a bit more happens than sleeping.
~ Scaurus’ house with Heron boy/boy and girl/girl:
with uneasy, wary eyes
Quite a bit more happens than sleeping.
~ Tavern with Heron Girl/girl:
It’s the only family heirloom you have.
Quite a bit more happens than sleeping.
~ Tavern with Heron boy/boy:
leading right through the big Forum to the Capitoline temples. We could see the rostrum where they give all the big speeches, and the navel, and Senate House, and we’ll be able to see the Emperor’s palace from there, and the new Temple of Jupiter—and do they let people look down the sacred well?—but we should go get a look at the new arena, and…
Quite a bit more happens than sleeping.
~ Tavern with Pavo Girl/girl and boy/boy:
leading right through the Forum. We could see the Senate House and the Emperor’s palace from there, and I’d love a look at the new arena, even from the outside.
Quite a bit more happens than sleeping.
@piggleywinks: The help is hugely appreciated! 
‘sp_man’: found and fixed.
her (*his): fixed a couple of these, will keep looking for any others.
extra lines: took out the misbehaving variable for now, and will put in a more elegant solution tonight.
Pretty good, but it slips into purple prose (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PurpleProse) at times. Also, go into more detail about leaving your families home. I haven’t played it to see what happens if you don’t leave, but if you do, you might want to show how you feel about slaves.
@theultimatechooser: I’m afraid I’m a fan of purple prose. Unless I’m writing something stark and contemporary. If there’s anything in specific that irks you, I’d consider an edit…but I do like purple, I’ll admit.
@Carolyne I have too say I’m pretty impressed with the story so far. You never find many stories that entail the main character just trying to make it as an average joe, or become more than what they are; double that for it being done in ancient rome. Can’t wait to see more of the story, keep up the good work!
Hi, @TheDragon, and thanks. Sometimes I find myself having to pull back and resist pushing the character too far up the Roman status ladder too fast
Everyone: I’m about to upload an update that’s fairly extensive “under the hood,” with a little expansion to the tutor and slave dealer paths. I’ve tried to do a thorough testing of it, but since most of my testing has to be done late at night when I’m severely groggy, caveats apply. I can step back to the previous version if the update turns out to be too wonky, but I wanted to roll something out this morning for anyone who’s been replaying to have something new to try.
Purple prose can be good and bad. If your writing tends to be highly intelligent, then you really can’t help purple prose and, additionally, it’s not that bad because the story will just flow on a higher level. But if you’re casually throwing in high-level words that don’t fit the scene then you’re going to have a problem. For example: “In the forum, you hear an antidisestablishmentarian a talking about . . .” Antidisestablishmentarian is an actual word, and is actually valid, but putting that word in a Roman forum scene just to impress is invalid. I often struggle with this myself when writing an ancient, political scene and I start using words and phrases like “economy,” “omniscient state,” and “the populous thinks.” I actually talk like that (scary, I know. :P), but know medieval king is going to. Charlemagne would look at me like I was some foreign god if I started analyzing the economic stability of serfdoms and the populous opinion towards the essentially fascist regime of his militaristic state–and Charlemagne was progressive if ever a medieval emperor was.
@adjppm1227: I’m definitely open to any specific editorial suggestions folks make. In particular, I haven’t scoured for anachronisms, and have only made a quick pass at run-on sentences.
Impressing the reader isn’t, I’d say, in my mind while I’m writing; I’m just trying to chew through to the viscera (guts??? ) of how I want the scene to feel. Unfortunately, that often used to involve a lot of semicolons (see one sentence ago). I can usually manage to cut myself down to a two-semicolon-a-day habit now.
When writing from a character’s POV you can describe things with their tone of voice–purple or plain or whatever–but it’s an interesting challenge to decide how to approach it when the main character is the reader, and the voice of the story is an omniscient world addressing the hero directly…with of course forays into the hero talking back–"#I pick up the vial of poison" or “#No, forget it, I wouldn’t do that.”
I have a semicolon problem, I admit it. My writing is littered with the infernal things; just today, I imagine I’ve used at least twenty or thirty of them. And that’s precisely my problem! You and I are both intelligent people, yes? Sometimes you’re telling the story through the perspective of an unintelligent character, and you just can help it when you’re talking intelligently but they aren’t all that intelligent.
@Carolyne I came across an error when going through the slave dealer path:
line 471: It is illegal to fall into an *else statement; you must *goto or *finish before the end of the indented block
The text that followed this error was “Terentia Anthe!” Scaurus strides over and wraps an arm around your shoulder. He seems happy. “I’ve seen how well you handle people,” he says…etc if that helps
Although, when I went through the path again I didn’t encounter any error, despite trying to make the same choices (more or less?).
I *do* like Scaurus’ nephew though, loving the “smooth deep voice” ;;). Then again, I’m a sucker for any well written male character so… 
EDIT: I just played through the tutor path, and I’m not sure if these appeared because I’m on my iPad or if Dropbox is being temperamental but every so often a random euro sign would appear. These are the ones I found:
To your pleasant surprise, Quintus isn’t an unruly youngster—he’s only two years younger than you.
We’re close in age—I try being more of a friend.
“That’s certainly an affluent and respected family,” you say—well, you assume.
Before you can take your turn to speak with Metellus—before you can even formulate what you want to say—his bodyguard grabs hold of your arm and pulls you to the front door.
Hey, @heyyoungblood. Those crazy stray characters are from dashes. I can’t figure out why sometimes they’re ok and sometimes not. I’ve been converting them to --double dashes-- when they go haywire.
I’ll check out the error message when I’m back at my laptop. Scaurus’ nephew has Big Opinions about Things, so you might find some trouble to get into with him I’m weirdly happy you chose Anthe as a name. I like that combination
@adjppm1227: I’d honestly never been aware of my little semicolon problem until I went back and read chapters from something I’d written several years ago. It was so much punctuation overuse and shocked me so much that, ever since, I automatically stop and think before daring to use a semicolon
In the tutor path, is there a way for Metellus to NOT find out about MC’s relationship with his daughter?
@attolia: Only if MC calls it off before it gets too messy. I’ll consider making it possible for you to make choices that successfully keep him in the dark.
That’s the problem with these big Roman houses…always some servant walking around, not enough doors, etc. etc.
He doesn’t always object to it, though. Sometimes he’s just sad that the MC is still too lowly to marry into his family.
If I don’t put my own thought name in I usually use Terentius Anthe or Justina. I have an obsession with the name Marc Antony so I use some form of the last name with first name Saxa.
I haven’t been by the forum in a really long time, so I just came across this and was convinced to delurk so I could say how much I’m enjoying it. I’ve been waiting for a really good historical fiction Choicescript game and this is definitely it! I like the writing, like the characters, and am pretty darn impressed by the number of choices and replay value the game has to offer. It’s a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to playing more as it’s finished.
(Although after playing the tutor path, I have this nagging feeling that everyone is going to die in a horrible natural disaster. ;_; )
fwiw, I didn’t find the prose especially purple or full of long words. More descriptive than some other Choicescript games, but that’s a good thing if you want the player to actually picture everything happening in ancient Rome. Which you do.
One bug report from the bookkeeper/overseer path: in the conspiracy conversation with Scaurus, when he refers to Aquillius/Aquillia as a “love-besotted (wo)man”, sometimes the gender doesn’t match up.
Not really a bug: when the game asks you about marriage, it seems a bit odd on replay that “the ___ family” changes gender based on the MC’s gender. I’m actually not sure whether the masculine or feminine form would make better sense but it seems like it ought to be consistent regardless of the MC’s gender? On the other hand, it would be darn near impossible to do the same thing for player-created names in Choicescript, so I guess this is pretty nitpicky.